


Five ways to confess to your flatmate

by TheWhiteLily



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Also a casefic, Doctor John Watson, Edit: Okay fine not MUCH angst, Ethical Dilemmas, Look no angst, M/M, Masturbation, No I'm not going to tell you what the confession is, No season 4 spoilers, Oblivious John, POV John Watson, Romance, You'll just have to guess, sigh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 14:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8804494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWhiteLily/pseuds/TheWhiteLily
Summary: Apparently Sherlock's got something to confess, and John has all sorts of ideas what it might be.





	1. Sherlock, interrupted

**Author's Note:**

> For the fan_flashworks "Confession" challenge.

John tipped the toast on into the bin.

He didn’t even know why he bothered anymore. _Of course_ Sherlock had refused to eat that morning, buried deep in his mind palace synthesising the evidence from the crime scene they’d been called to late last night, and barely home from in time for the breakfast Sherlock wouldn’t eat anyway.

The case took precedence over everything, at least for Sherlock.

John wished it could do the same for him. His eyes were grainy and sore, his muscles ached with the desire to just go to bed—but sleep or no sleep, he really _did_ need to be on time for his shift today. He’d already cancelled three times this month when a case had run long, or sleep had run short, or Sherlock had texted him while he was with his second patient of the day with the address of the gunrunners' warehouse and the message that he was on his way there right now.  John didn't think he'd even apologised to his patient or explained to the staff, he'd gone out the door so fast, so focused on texting his idiot flatmate that he was on his way and to please please  _please_ not do anything stupid before he got there.

If John called in sick again today, he wasn’t likely to be rostered at all next month, and if John didn’t get rostered he wasn’t going to make rent, and if John didn’t make rent he wasn’t going to be able to stay at Baker Street, and if John didn’t stay at Baker Street…. Well, that wasn’t an option, was it?

Besides, he’d given the Patterson family from last night the address of the surgery, told them he’d be in that morning if young Cynthia’s vomiting bug hadn’t worked it’s way through and she needed an injection to settle her stomach.

Sherlock hadn’t taken the news of John’s imminent abandonment particularly well. He’d made a cutting remark about John’s priorities—which seemed perfectly well-placed to John, given they still didn’t get paid for working with Scotland Yard, and they did have to eat, after all—and then flounced off in the direction of the couch to think. As though John’s presence on the scene was ever actually needed apart from giving Sherlock another person to alternately insult and show off for, let alone his presence in the flat while Sherlock performed the calisthenics apparently necessary to negotiate his enormous brain.

Dramatic git.

“John,” said Sherlock, making John jump. Speak of the devil. He was standing in the doorway between the lounge and the kitchen, sounding strangely abstracted, as though his attention had only made it halfway out of his mind palace and into the room with John.

“Mmm?” responded John, collecting the plates from around the microscope, piling them one on top of the other and taking the handles of four mugs in one hand to dump them all in the sink together. He had half an hour before he needed to leave, just enough time to catch up on the dishes that he always seemed to give up on making Sherlock do in the end, and to do a little more moping over being pulled constantly in two directions at once.

Although perhaps if Sherlock was talking to him again, he could talk him through whatever it was he was thinking through about the case instead of making John get on with his scheduled pre-work moping.

It did seem to be an interesting one; a burglary gone wrong, the Pattersons having called the police at one a.m. when they’d returned from a screening of Macbeth to find the locks forced and a boy in a dark hoodie on the floor of their living room, bludgeoned to death, lying on his back in a smear of blood. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Cynthia—who’d been forced to miss out on the play because of unfortunately timed stomach flu—hadn’t seen or heard a thing, having spent the evening in the bathroom with her arms wrapped around the toilet. And hadn’t _that_ been a fun witness interview when Sherlock had decided to double-check how genuine her nausea was. John could have saved him the trouble; the pitiful dry-heaving they could hear from the other room was obviously real. Given the pallor of her face, it looked like a whole troupe of morris dancers complete with bells and hankies could have set up a practice session in the living room without her noticing.

“Are you sure you can’t stay for the case today?” asked Sherlock.

John continued his clattering collection of dishes at the sink, stacking them in piles and doing his best not to jump for the tiny crumb of attention Sherlock had given him. He could see the other man from the corner of his eye, half watching him, half an eye still on his phone and frowning in apparently unfocused confusion.

“I’m sorry,” said John firmly. “You’ll have to make do on your own. I really need to go to work.”

“Well, I need to ask you…” said Sherlock, then stopped, looking as though what he was about to say was a painful affront upon logic. “I’ve got a confession.”

John dumped the crockery into the sink and turned to look at his flatmate, folding his arms across his chest against the sudden terror of what the other man might say.

Was it the tea? Since Baskerville—and the Wednesday he’d never recovered and didn’t believe a word of what Sherlock had told him about how he’d mainly just slept—John had always kept a close eye on his beverages, but today he—yes, he had, hadn’t he? Sherlock had seemed occupied in his mind palace, muttering about dishes in the sink—although John knew better than to take that as an indication that he might actually _do_  any of them—and so John had nipped off to the loo leaving the cup to brew unattended on the bench.

Bollocks.

Had he been drugged again? Poisoned? How would he know? What day was it today—Christ, it was clearly still morning, but was it still _Tuesday_ morning, or had he lost time again in one of Sherlock’s ridiculously unscientific ‘experiments’? Was that why Sherlock was talking to him again, because it had been a whole day since their snippy almost-argument? Had John missed his shift at the surgery after all?

John had a flash of empathy for women who’d been forced to practice absurd levels of hypervigilance over the possibility of potentially finding more than they’d ordered in an unattended drink—although at least he’d never have to worry about _that_ with Sherlock.

No, it didn’t make sense—there was no whisper of a medication Sherlock might have decided he needed to test in relation to the current case, only… only….

Oh.

Oh no.

The vomiting girl.

Had Sherlock dosed him with something so that he could run tests on the level of distraction posed by having his head in the toilet bowl?

“All right, Sherlock,” said John, and crossed his arms across his chest, taking a deep breath to prepare himself for the worst. “Let’s have it.”

But before Sherlock could speak, his mobile pinged a text alert and, while his face twitched in annoyance at the distraction, he checked it anyway.

“Oh!” he cried, face lit up with revelation, the previous conversation apparently forgotten. “Of _course_ she won’t tell them where. I was _right_ , John!"

He'd grabbed his coat and was out the door and bounding down the stairs before John could offer more than a token protest.

“Sherlock?” yelled John after him. “Sherlock!”

But Sherlock was gone.

“What could _you_ need to confess, Sherlock?” John asked the puzzled air of the empty flat.


	2. Would I lie to you?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock wouldn't hurt John... would he?

Because that was the big question, wasn’t it? What could _Sherlock_ possibly want to confess? The range of options was frightening, even if none of them seemed truly possible.

John had found everything from bird-eating spiders in the bathtub to octopus tentacles in his underwear drawer without Sherlock feeling the slightest twinge of guilt that might require a _confession_.

He considered the milky brown residue on the bottom of his RAMC mug, and pushed it to one side as he washed the other plates.

He _could_ , of course, take the cup to Barts and ask Molly to test it. But Sherlock wouldn’t have forgotten to explain if he’d dosed John with anything truly dangerous. _Surely_. Even though he’d been distracted by the case.

And after checking the date on his phone, John was moderately certain that today was still Tuesday—still Tuesday _this week_ , even, and in all ways was absolutely _positively_ the day immediately following yesterday, so at least whatever it was hadn’t happened to him in time he couldn’t remember anymore. If it had been an emetic, John should have been feeling the effects by now, so he was probably way off track with the whole thing. There was no other poison associated with the case, at least as far as John was aware.

The victim had been hit over the head with something heavy, nothing fancy. A bookend, Lestrade had shown them, in the shape of a large globe, the partner of which was still on the scene even though the one used for the murder had been removed. It had obviously been the first thing to hand when the fight broke out. Assuming there _had_ been a fight, because apart from some fallen books and a couple of rifled drawers dumped out on the carpet—and the bloody stripe where the body had been dragged for a few feet and then abandoned—the place looked pretty clean. The entire scene being bizarre—and the murdered boy himself being l without identification—Lestrade had called in Sherlock to see if he could help them work out who he was, and get them a start on tracking down his accomplice.

Of course Sherlock had been brilliant as usual. He’d all but identified the boy on the spot from the mist of fine black-on-black paint droplets on his sleeves (obviously a street artist), the callus on his index fingertip (a dedicated one, too), and a discarded joint he’d spotted in the garden bed by the front step. (Honestly, Lestrade, do you use your eyes at all?) They’d find the boy’s friends, Sherlock had said, indulging in entry-level bad-boy behaviour in the graffiti alley tucked behind a particular video-game arcade. (For god’s sake, he’s used an old ticket as roll-up paper, even Anderson couldn’t have found _that_  too difficult to work out. Well, maybe _Anderson_.) Then he’d suggested Lestrade question the next door neighbour about what she knew, despite the Pattersons' obviously dubious reaction about what a woman they’d barely ever seen a sign existed would know. (Just because you can’t see in! The silhouettes in the window behind the net curtain are clearly visible, that means she can see out. And _of course_ she’s a recluse, with OCD that debilitating—just look at the symmetry of those stacked dishes—but she spends a lot of time at that sink, washing. She saw the whole thing happen, mark my words. Oh, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, you’d just ask all sorts of boring questions. I've found you a witness. I’m going home. Text me if anything interesting happens.)

Which really meant, John had come to understand despite his demeanour, that Sherlock wasn’t 100% certain. He had a guess—one he was having trouble believing no one else had seen the obviousness of—but it wasn’t one that he could be sure enough wasn’t a blind to verbalise it and risk losing face if he was wrong.

Sherlock had tried to explain it to John once, in his idiosyncratically insulting way, what he got out of having John along on cases. How it helped to have someone making obvious assumptions, which weren’t always so obvious to Sherlock because, with all the tiny clues that he could see, he sometimes missed what an idiotic criminal only aware of half the evidence could possibly be trying to make people think.

And John heard what Sherlock wouldn’t often admit, too. That sometimes—however good a manipulator he was—Sherlock could miss the emotional motivations that made ordinary people tick.

Of course, it was also handy to have someone to run experiments on. Bastard.

John shoved his mug into the sink full of hot soapy water, pushing the cloth right down into the bottom of the mug and twisting it around to lift the stuck on ring, before setting it decisively on the drying rack. He dried his hands, and walked away to gather up his things.

If Sherlock had needed to test a poison, uncomfortable would probably be the worst of it. If John had accidentally ingested something that was going to make him seriously unwell, then Sherlock would have had him bent over the sink and being sick before even bothering to explain why.

John knew _that_ from bitter experience. Once he’d had recovered from the infamous Swapped Mug Incident, they’d had a long talk about mugs being for tea and marked beakers being for experiments. Sherlock had seemed equally keen to avoid a repeat, and John had at least never _caught_ him crossing that particular boundary ever since. From then on John had only had to worry about being _intentionally_ dosed.

He glanced around the flat, looking for inspiration as he pulled on his coat and gathered his wallet and keys, trying to think of something else—anything else—to explain Sherlock’s behaviour.

“John,” he muttered, eyes glancing off his laptop before he headed resolutely over to the doorway. “I opened up your email and worked through all your friends, sending obnoxious deductions.” No, Sherlock wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with that. ”John, I sent records of your pornography browsing history to all your ex-girlfriends.” Likewise. “John, I hacked into your blog and fixed all the typographical errors and your unfortunate exclamation mark habit.” Sherlock would have considered that a _favour_.

Although perhaps John had better check the blog on his phone, just to make sure.

None of the options he tried seemed right for the weighty word _confession_. A confession was something you’d been hiding for some time. Something that you knew would at least potentially upset the confesee. He clattered down the stairs and pulled the door shut behind him.

If _Sherlock_ was worried that something he’d done was a bit not good… if he was being forced to admit something that he knew would make John hit the roof, knew it even before the people around him had started to react and give him the clues he needed to realise he’d ploughed straight through some fundamental rule of human interaction, then it was _really_ time to worry.

And John _was_ worried.

Still, for all the day to day inconveniences and dangers of living with Sherlock, John did trust him. Not, perhaps, with the perception to make John’s life easy, or safe, or—he supposed it had to be said— _boring_ , but at least not to really hurt him.

Not on purpose, anyway.

Not again.

Surely.

“John, I…” John tried, glancing around at the other pedestrians gathering at the corner waiting to cross Baker Street, and even under his breath he had to clear his throat before he could finish mumbling it out loud to test the feel of it. “I’m going to have to convince you I’m dead. Again. I’m going to be _really_ convincing. For years. But I’d rather not go through the whole thing with the punching in the face and the drug relapses and the bullets in the chest again this time, so I thought I’d warn you.”

That would certainly justify the word “confession”. Although it was still quite unlikely to result in a reduction in resultant punching, at least in the immediate future.

But no. They’d finally, finally made it past the fallout of all that. Sherlock had learned his lesson about faking his death. John was _sure_ of that. It had to be something else.

Although when Sherlock eventually _did_ die, John was probably going to have to do the autopsy himself and hold a three-day vigil with his corpse before he believed it. Possibly not even then.

The light turned green and, unable to deduce his way any closer to an answer without further information, John gave up, hoped Sherlock hadn’t exposed him to some virulently infectious disease he was going to pass on to everyone at work, and tried to put the whole thing out of his mind.


	3. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some GP consultations are more like a battlefield than others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Discussion of a medical/ethical issue that may upset and/or offend. Details in the end notes if you want to check first.
> 
> Bit of a change of tone for this interlude chapter. Don't worry, grumpy codependent John will get back to theorising about what manner of obnoxious brat his flatmate is, as soon as he's finished his shift as a very good doctor.

“Ah, Cynthia. I wondered if I might see you today,” said John sympathetically, as the girl slumped her way into his office.

Before Cynthia shut the door firmly behind her, he could see Vera Patterson in the waiting room, dressed much more simply than she had been after the play last night and visibly trying to occupy herself in a dogeared novel. She glanced worriedly at John over her glasses, obviously restraining herself from following her daughter into the consultation room.

“There’s been quite a few people coming in with this bug,” he told Cynthia. “Seems to be a nasty one. Have you been able to keep anything down?”

“No,” said Cynthia. She folded her tall frame down into the chair beside his desk, hugging the plastic sick bag she’d been given by reception. Her eyes were red and bloodshot, sunken in with dark circles underneath from the lack of sleep and the dehydration, the skin on her lips cracked and peeling, her long curly hair pulled back from her face in a rough tangled ponytail. She looked like death warmed up, and that was a medical term. “Anything I try to eat or drink just comes straight back up again.”

“Has it been slowing down at all?” John asked, and wrinkled his nose in sympathy as she shook her head. He put a new plastic cap onto the thermometer and pressed the tip into her ear. “How often have you been sick today?”

“About every twenty minutes?”

That fit with what he’d seen the previous night. John bit his lip, trying not to smile inappropriately at the memory of Sherlock’s face when, about twenty minutes into her witness interview, he’d accidentally-on-very-obviously-purpose blocked the poor girl’s headlong flight to the bathroom and ended up with a generous splattering of bile down the front of his trousers. At least _that_ wouldn’t be a witness interrogation manoeuvre he’d be repeating soon.

“Headache?” John asked her, serious again. “Stomach cramps? And the other end?”

Cynthia nodded twice, and then made a face. “That’s slowing down. I think there’s nothing left.”

“I see.” John took the thermometer from her ear at the beep, and frowned at the number as he flicked the cover off into the bin. Too high: that wouldn’t be helping the dehydration either. “Have you taken anything for the fever?”

She looked nauseous at the very thought.

“Okay,” said John decisively, “I think we need to put a stop to this before you lose any more fluids.” He turned back to the computer and navigated through the forms to dispense medication from the storeroom, transferring data from the patient file that reception had sent to his screen. “I’m going to give you prochlorperazine—you might know it as Stematil. Have you had it before?”

She shook her head, then looked like she regretted the motion, her face green.

“It’s an injection that goes in your bottom. It should make you feel a lot better within half an hour or so. Then you’ll need to start getting fluids back into you. Start slow so you don’t make yourself sick. Sips of water, sucking on ice chips, electrolyte drinks or rehydration sachets from the pharmacy if you can manage them. You need get your hydration levels back up, not just water but salts and sugar, too. Do you have any allergies to medications that you’re aware of?” he asked checking off boxes as he ran down the form on the screen.

“No.”

“No history of heart, kidney, thyroid or clotting problems?  Epilepsy or depression?”

“No, nothing.”

“No possibility that you could be pregnant?”

There was a telling frozen silence from the chair beside his desk, to which John very deliberately didn’t react. Shit.

Smoothly, he clicked back onto to her personal record and found her birth date. Yes, he’d remembered that right, she was only sixteen. Three months ago. _Shit_.

She _was_  sixteen, fortunately, which at least simplified one can of worms.

“No, of course I’m not,” said Cynthia, too late, then pressed her lips closed, the sick bag crinkling in her hands.

John turned back to her with a calm, blank face, his tone as mild and practical as he could possibly make it.

“This consultation is completely confidential,” he assured her. “Not even your parents can access your records without your permission. Are you sexually active? Even if you’re using contraception, it can fail. I can do a test right now to make sure, if you aren’t certain.”

“Um,” she said, staring into the sick bag intensely, cold sweat standing on her forehead where it had been dry, and John realised there was no point in keeping on trying to talk to her for the next minute or so.

He gave her some privacy as she retched, keeping one eye on her as he collected a urine sample jar in a paper bag, as well as a small plastic cup of water. When she was finished, he slid a box of tissues and a new sick bag across the desk towards her, disposing of the old one with practiced motions.

“No,” she admitted finally, when she’d wiped her mouth and taken a tiny sip of water. Her face was pale and exhausted and defeated. “I. Um. Don’t need a test. I already took one, at home.”

She stared miserably into her sick bag for another few moments, before looking at John again, eyes flaming.

“Can’t you just give me the medicine to make this stop anyway?” she said, her voice breaking as she surged to her feet, dashing away tears with the back of her hand. “I don’t _care_ what happens to it! Dad’s going to _kill_ me if he finds out, that’s if Mum doesn’t get to me first for being so bl-loody _stupid_! I’m meant to be doing my A levels! I want to go to University! I want to be an architect! _And_  I’m on the team for the National Volleyball Cup in February! I can’t do _that_ if I’m like _this_! I don’t want to have thrown my life away at sixteen, uneducated and unemployable and tied to a fff-fucking _baby_!”

She tripped over the curses, but persisted doggedly to get through them, obviously an unpracticed swearer who felt the occasion warranted it.

John’s heart twisted with sympathy for her.

“How long has it been since your last period?” he asked.

She shrugged, fire gone and just an embarrassed, too-young girl again, her long body curled miserably in the chair, shivering. “I never really kept track. A couple of months?”

“Do you have an idea of the date of the encounter?”

She shrugged again. “No. Could have been. Um. A few times.”

“Consensual?”

Not for the first time, John was glad to be well known as the doctor who radiated unthreatening knitwear all over the consultation room, no matter how many awkward questions he needed to ask.

Cynthia twisted her lips, avoiding looking at him, but admitted, “Yes.”

“Well,” said John practically. “Let’s double check that home test result today. The symptoms you’ve been having aren’t likely to be just from pregnancy, not with the diarrhoea and that fever—” John froze in as something occurred. “You haven’t tried to take anything, have you, to terminate it?”

That could be _very_ dangerous: a frightened, desperate girl trying to take care of things in secret could really harm herself.

She shook her head, convincingly puzzled at the idea, and John nodded slowly.

“Good,” he said, doing his best not to spook her with his relief. “There’s safe, legal options available to you whether you choose to continue the pregnancy or not, and I can support you in whatever you decide—or I’ll help you find the right specialist who can. We’re on your side.” He smiled at her encouragingly, pleased to find her returning it a little. “Right now, I think that the reason things are so bad is that you’ve got the gastroenteritis on top, and some of the symptoms are lining up. I should still be able to give you something that will make you feel a bit better for that.”

It wouldn’t be as strong as he’d have liked given her condition, because even if she intended to terminate—probably the practical course of action at her age—he couldn’t give her anything that might damage the embryo for now. If she couldn’t establish how far along she was, she’d need an ultrasound before proceeding, and these kind of decisions were never as simple as they first seemed. There was always a chance that she would change her mind.

“Once you’re feeling more like yourself,” he said, “I’ll examine you properly to make sure there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening, and we’ll talk through your options, okay? But the first thing we need to do is confirm that first test. Now, your mother’s still out in the waiting room, is she? And you don’t want her to find out? No, that’s fine,” he held up a hand, “it’s entirely up to you.”

Vera Patterson had been sitting facing the consulting room door, as John remembered it, anxiously tapping her heels on the carpet and crumpling the corners of her book. She seemed like a nice woman, genuinely worried about her daughter from what he could see, and the right family support could make all the difference to a girl who needed it—but it wasn’t his decision who to tell.

He handed Cynthia the sample jar.

“You can go through the back into the treatment room,” he said, indicating, “and use the staff toilet. It’s just at the end on the left. You’ll need to collect a mid-stream sample, that means—”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter contains discussions of teenage pregnancy, abortion, and pro-choice sentiments.


	4. Areas of Expertise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John has his lunch--eventually--and checks in with Sherlock's progress on the case.

Forty minutes later, Cynthia scurried out to the waiting room to join her worried-looking mother, clutching a sealed manilla envelope full of pamphlets of information, the card for a youth crisis counselling line, and referrals for an ultrasound and a battery of blood tests.

Instead of buzzing for his next patient, John rang through to the front and let reception know he needed to take his lunch. He set himself up in the break room with a sandwich, took out his phone and tried three times to write a text to Sherlock, deleting each one and wrestling with his conscience all the while.

Eventually he decided on:

**_How’s the case going?_ **

_Solved. On stakeout, waiting for the final piece of explanation, and proof. SH_

**_Stake out?!_ **

**_Should you have waited for me?_ **

**_Is Lestrade there?_ **

**_Is it dangerous?_ **

_Not in the least. The only danger would be dying of boredom while I wait for her to show. SH_

Three rolling dots showed in the conversation window for a moment before another message arrived.

_Besides, you assured me if I pulled you away from the surgery again this month, even during your lunch hour, the consequences would be dire. SH_

**_True, but you know I’d never let you go into danger alone. Is Lestrade with you?_ **

_Yes. SH_

Well, that was all right then. Greg would make sure Sherlock didn’t do anything too idiotic. Or he’d try at least, and then would laugh with John over a pint about whatever ridiculous situation Sherlock had managed to swan through without even noticing.

**_Who are you staking out?_ **

_The neighbour. She sees everything that goes on in that house. SH_

**_You think she saw the murder happen?_ **

_I know she did. But she’s lying about it. SH_

**_Why would she do that? Has she got something to hide?_ **

There was a long silence before the text alert pinged again, several times in quick succession, the blistering speed of Sherlock’s typing meaning that John could barely read one message before the next pushed it out of the way:

_Unclear. SH_

_She’s lived in the house alone for twenty years, but never interacted with the Pattersons. They didn’t even know her name. SH_

_Larissa Margate. SH_

_Clinical OCD: th_ _e elaborate grouping of those ‘dirty’ dishes and the idiosyncratic order she’d clearly been selecting them to clean and set on the drying rack went well beyond order and into pathology. SH_

_Obviously a regular ritual, from the condition of the drains. She must stand there for hours on end, facing that window as she washes. SH_

_She’s neurotic, not psychotic as far as I can tell. She would need some motive to lie. SH_

_I don’t know what it could be. SH_

The flurry of messages paused for a few moments before, before the three dots that showed a message being written resumed their dance.

_Of course, when I directed Lestrade towards her, I assumed he would be competent enough to question her without spooking her, but apparently I have to walk him through everything. SH_

_Still, for all his faults, he’s remarkably good at remaining stationary for long periods of time. SH_

_The lack of any brain activity probably makes that easier for him. SH_

Quickly, John deleted the text he’d been in the middle of composing and wrote:

**_For god’s sake don’t tell him that!_ **

_Too late. SH_

John raised his eyes to the ceiling. Of course it was.

**_Leave poor Greg alone. Keep talking to me if you’re bored. This neighbour sounds like a puzzle._ **

**_Are you sure she’s lying? Her disorder means she’s likely to be hyper-responsible, so lying to the police really doesn’t fit unless there’s a reason._ **

_Yes. SH_

**_Maybe she doesn’t want to get someone in trouble. Maybe one of the Pattersons is involved?_ **

_Why would she care? They’re not related. Not friends. They’ve never spoken. They share a fence, and that appears to be the extent of neighbourly relations. SH_

**_Apart from the fact that she’s been watching them through the window for twenty years._ **

_Does that matter? SH_

**_I’d say so. They’re not just strangers to her, even if she is to them. She’s seen them going about their lives, eating and cleaning and fighting and raising children and doing all the things people do. Even if she’s been too wound up in her head to ever talk to them, she would still care about what happened to them._ **

_Ah. Attachment without seeking a reciprocal bond. SH_

John frowned at the dry words, saddened not for the first time at the jaundiced view Sherlock got of human interaction through the lens of criminal behaviour: amongst all the jealous lovers, cheating spouses, frightened secret-mongers, greedy, arrogant bastards and possessive dicks who went around killing and stealing and destroying other people’s lives to make their own a little bit more convenient, there were comparatively few who were happy simply to see other people being happy.

 ** _It is possible, you know,_** he typed, **_to love someone without needing them to love you back or murder them._**

_Yes, I know. SH_

_It makes sense now. SH_

_Thank you. SH_

**_It’s fine_** , typed John, somewhat taken aback.

John dithered, at the silent screen, his thumbs tapping idly on the keyboard, trying out options for what he might say to Sherlock. _He_ might be sure the case was solved, but there was still something Sherlock didn’t know, and he didn’t even know he didn’t know it. It probably didn’t matter, but it might. And someone had been murdered.  But not  _John_ _'s_ patient.

There was nothing he could say, not without breaking the law, not to mention his own ethical code, and even the most open-ended hints that he might know something something seemed like too much of a risk when he was talking to _Sherlock_.

He deleted the latest half-written text and threw his phone down on the table in disgust, just as it pinged with a new text.

_Cynthia Patterson came to you for an anti-emetic and you found out that she’s pregnant. SH_

Shit! John jaw dropped as he stared at the text, wondering if Sherlock would ever cease to astound him.

 _You’ve spent the past three minutes starting and stopping composing a text_ _,_ came Sherlock’s next message, unerringly reading his mind again from across town. _Either you’re typing your latest blog post into the message box, or you’re struggling to find a way to say something that you know you can’t. SH_

_No need to worry your little head, you didn’t give anything away. I already knew. SH_

_I do actually possess some level of discretion. SH_

**_You could have fooled me, the way you wouldn’t leave her alone when she was trying to be sick!_ **

**_How did you find out?_ **

_Is there any other reason that a post-pubescent woman would experience persistent nausea and vomiting? SH_

John stared at his phone for a moment, appalled.

 ** _YES!!!_** he typed back, stabbing at the keys on the screen viciously, incensed at the idea that Sherlock had lucked his way into the right answer.

 _Well, I’ll defer to your medical opinion on that_ , Sherlock fired back. _But in my experience of crime, feminine vomiting tends to be relevant in the vicinity of dead teenage bad boys. SH_

**_The vomiting isn’t from the pregnancy! Not mostly, anyway! I think she’s got this gastro that’s been going around! And you deserved every drop she hit you with, you sexist wanker!_ **

_I may have also picked up some hint from the positive pregnancy test hidden at the bottom of the bathroom bin. The bedrooms were easier to take a look around without being noticed, but I did finally manage to check the bathroom when they left me alone to sponge off my trousers. SH_

John closed his eyes against the heady feeling of rightness, as a portion of disconnected strangeness in the universe clicked back into place. Suddenly the unexpected shot Cynthia had seemed to get through Sherlock’s armour didn’t seem so outrageous. The man was incredible!

It was the other thing that would never cease to amaze him about Sherlock’s deductions: after the initial tenuous threads of theory he seemed to spin out of cobwebs and nowhere, came the layer upon layer of confirmation that it turned out he’d gathered to back it up. He only tended to mention one or two things that had led him to pursue a particular conclusion, but under further questioning it usually turned out that out his massive, extraordinary brain had filled in the finer strokes of the picture with hundreds of other small—or not so small—confirmations and eliminations, tiny potentialities considered and confirmed or discarded which, in his certainty he was right and frustration with communicating the obvious, he never bothered to enumerate.

 ** _You sneaky bastard!_** John sent back.

Then: **_Fantastic!_**

It was the only word John had that could put shape to the feeling of intense affection and belonging that only Sherlock could engender in him, solely by being _Sherlock_ enough to make a young girl throw up on him so he could get a private look in her bathroom bin.

 ** _Listen…_** John typed again, feeling on firmer ground now and needing a second opinion from an expert colleague. **_I probably shouldn’t tell you this either, but she said something about her parents killing her if they found out. She was probably just being dramatic, but… Sherlock, you’d know if she was sick because someone had given her something, wouldn’t you, trying to hurt her, or to end the pregnancy?_**

John bit his tongue waiting for the response, but Sherlock didn’t make him wait long.

_How do you even come up with these ridiculous ideas, John? You think it’s gastroenteritis: of course it is. No one’s trying to hurt her: someone’s trying to protect her. SH_

Torn between offense for himself and relief for Cynthia, John shook his head at the phone. After a moment, he settled on being glad. The poor girl had enough to worry about right now, although perhaps having a murderous protector wasn’t all that vast an improvement on being the potential next victim.

 ** _So you think the dead boy’s the father, then?_** typed John. **_Makes sense._**

_It takes a very considerate housebreaker to extinguish his half-smoked joint on the doorstep before coming inside. Obviously he was there by invitation. SH_

**_Amazing! Only you would think that was obvious. :)_ **

Well, John considered, perhaps if Stan and Vera Patterson weren’t as unaware of Cynthia’s predicament as she’d assumed, maybe they’d taken their metaphorical shotguns to the young man part responsible for her condition. After all, they were each other’s primary alibi for having been out of the house during the window for time of death. They’d certainly _seemed_ nice, but what kind of parents swanned off to see Macbeth while their daughter was that seriously ill at home, anyway?

 ** _Have you found the murder weapon?_** he wondered. Last he’d heard, Greg had been hoping for fingerprint evidence when they did.

_Oh, I knew exactly where it was last night. SH_

**_Where?! Have you told Greg yet? Tell me you’re not contaminating evidence, Sherlock!_ **

_Of course I’m not. SH_

_But a better question than where it is now would be: where was it before last night? SH_

John couldn’t help but notice that Sherlock had neglected to answer his question about telling Greg, which meant _no_.

**_Didn’t Stan Patterson say it was missing from the far end of that same shelf where the one we saw was?_ **

_Unfortunately, that end of the shelf was stacked with newer paperbacks, right to the end. SH_

He frowned. So either Stan had lied, or he’d forgotten that it had been recently moved.

**_If it didn’t fit there, where did they put it?_ **

_The usual place employed in a home cursed with literary occupants. SH_

What did that mean? On a reading table? Another bookshelf? No, wait, he was going to get this. Literary occupants. It was a heavy brass globe, mounted on a sturdy square base. Would they keep it with books about the world? With an atlas? That didn’t help. Was it something from a book? Sherlock seemed to know far too many nursery rhymes, was it something from one of them? Or had they got rid of it, to make room for _more_ books? Everyone had been assuming all along that the murder weapon was missing—but maybe it wasn’t! They only had the Pattersons’ word that there ever had been a second globe.  Maybe the boy had been murdered with the one that was still in the room, but it had been properly cleaned up afterwards and set back on the shelf.

Still, that didn’t seem likely, given the oddly minor, unfocused dishevelment of the crime scene: the two drawers of various oddments emptied onto the carpet, the bloody smear left from the bleeding head wound after the boy's body had been dragged a few feet and then abandoned in the middle of the room, a couple of books lying on the floor.  It was both too little, and too much.  No wonder Greg had called Sherlock in.

John sighed, and gave up.

**_Which is where, Sherlock?_ **

_That’s what I’m trying to prove. SH_

John rolled his eyes. He knew Sherlock well enough to know that meant he wasn’t going to get any more specifics on that subject until the whole case was tied up with a bow.

But now his mind was more settled on the issue of Cynthia, perhaps he’d have more luck on something else. The drama had thoroughly distracted from Sherlock’s attempt to talk to him back at Baker Street, before he’d been called away.

**_Well, if you don’t want to spoil the surprise, you can at least tell me more about the confession you had this morning. Should I be worried?_ **

_Of course not. I thought you'd likely understand the reasons behind it. It’s more your area of expertise than mine. SH_

John raised his eyebrows, unaware that Sherlock had lately considered John to even have an area of expertise, apart from helpful levels of idiocy. He waited a minute, to see if there was any more coming, but Sherlock seemed to have said all he intended to say.

At least it really didn’t sound like John had been an unwitting experimental subject this time.

John’s area of expertise… perhaps it was a medical issue? Could Sherlock be ill? John tried, without much more success than he’d had this morning, not to jump to any conclusions. Perhaps Sherlock’s confession required the delicate phrasing of an experienced blogger. Or the not-so-delicate attentions of an ex-military man with an illegal service weapon.

God, it usually wasn’t this hard to get details of something out of Sherlock once he’d decided to tell you—hoarding the details of a case for a spectacular revelation was one thing, but with anything else it was mostly _stopping_ the details you really didn’t want to hear that was the hard part.

John tried to narrow it down.

**_My area of expertise being…_ **

His phone pinged again.

_Sentiment. SH_

A physical shock ran through John as he stared at the text, as though the phone had been wired with a faulty connection, the loose electricity running up from the tips of his fingers through his arms and chest, right down to his toes. All thought of the case, and of Cynthia’s predicament, were driven completely from his mind.

Had John been coming at this from the wrong angle all along? Because _that_ … abruptly _that_ made perfect sense of why Sherlock would have used the word ‘confession’. And why he would be cagey and difficult to pin down about this in addition to the case. A transgression against common sense or decency, Sherlock would commit without guilt and often without even realising that anyone might consider his behaviour to be a problem. But if Sherlock was being plagued by an unruly _emotion_ … well, that was an entirely different matter.

Sherlock so rarely admitted to feeling anything at all, apart from boredom. Growing up with Mycroft had apparently taught him that the softer emotions were a weakness indulged in by lesser mortals—although John had long ago stopped believing Sherlock’s protestations that he didn’t _actually_ feel. As though anyone who’d seen the man’s face when he didn’t solve a case in time, in that moment before he rationalised it all as something that should be irrelevant to him, could believe that.

The latest text cast matters in quite a different light, and John was glad he hadn’t been more than superficially short with Sherlock that morning in expectation of bad news.

He typed in a message and sent it.

 ** _I’m honoured to help_**.

John waited ten minutes, finishing the sandwich he’d been neglecting in favour of his phone, before he decided that Sherlock might need further prompting to get started.

**_Sherlock?_ **

He waited.

**_Are you still there?_ **

Twenty minutes later, when John was forced to give up to attend to his next patient, there was still no response.


	5. Obvious answers

The new information had sent John’s imagination spinning on an entirely new axis, which was definitely not conducive to concentrating on the minor cases of gout and sniffles, or the three more cases of gastroenteritis he had to deal with that afternoon. He had to hospitalise a toddler who hadn’t kept any fluids down for twenty-four hours and had become dangerously dehydrated, which made him forget about the whole thing for an hour while he rang around trying to find him a bed. When the listless little boy and his white-knuckled mother were gone, he spent a couple of minutes at his desk, catching his breath, and rubbed tired eyes as he wondered how Sherlock was getting on with his stakeout.

And with his sentiment.

Sherlock wanted to confess some kind of _sentiment_ to him? What sentiment could _Sherlock_ possibly be talking about, that had him talking in riddles?

Aside from the obvious, of course.

Whatever it was, it had to be something Sherlock had been struggling with, or perhaps hiding.  He'd said he thought John would understand, so there didn't seem to be a reason to have been hiding whatever it was.  Perhaps that was conclusion he'd only come to recently.  Or perhaps it was the awareness of himself he'd been lacking, god knew Sherlock wasn't exactly emotionally self-aware.

But what could it possibly be that Sherlock wanted to tell him?  John simply couldn't imagine.

 _Aside_ from the obvious.

At least, the one everyone _else_ seemed to think was obvious, because it couldn’t be that, even if _that_ was abruptly the only option taking up all the room in John’s brain, crushing out any space for competition before other ideas could blossom.

 _Of course_ Sherlock hadn’t meant _that_. At least not in any way that would require him to confess anything to _John_. Because Sherlock had never shown any signs of genuine interest remotely in that direction, not since The Woman.

Not that John had been watching for signs of it, of course.

Well.

He may _possibly_ have been watching for signs, but only in trying to work out whatever signal it was that Sherlock kept giving off that made people keep getting the wrong idea about things between the two of them.

Couldn’t a bloke have a best friend, after all, who he lived with and worked with and spent all his spare time with and got into unlikely scrapes with and wrote a blog about how genuinely extraordinary he was, without people jumping to all sorts of ridiculous conclusions?

John had got married, for goodness sake. To _someone else_.

Even if that hadn’t exactly ended happily, and now he was back living with, working with, spending all his spare time getting into scrapes with and blogging about Sherlock.

There had to be something people saw in Sherlock that John was missing, something that was giving them the wrong idea.

Not _that_. Obviously not _that_. Just because Sherlock was a needy git without any comprehension of personal boundaries didn’t mean he meant anything by it. He’d been very clear on that. They both had.

Only. God, if this _was_ that…

If Sherlock had a, a _feeling_ he needed to confess to John, to John specifically, despite his avowed lack of area…

If Sherlock had developed some kind of… _sentiment_ towards… towards _John_ , while John hadn’t been watching because he was working through the grieving process over, well, over everything that had happened—or worse, if Sherlock had been hiding that sentiment all along, even with… everything—if he’d worked himself up now to the point where he was planning to make a clean breast of it….

God.

How the _hell_ was John going to let him down easily?

Sherlock didn’t let himself be vulnerable often, too caught up in maintaining to his sociopathic mask, the one that let him pretend his social missteps were only because he didn’t care to try.

The last thing John would want would be to injure that great, deeply buried, fragile heart.

Three excruciatingly long hours later, John finished up his last patient and sent another text.

**_Done at the surgery, can I join you on the case?_ **

_Don’t bother. Stakeout a success, case complete. Larissa Margate cried on me. Then Cynthia did. Why do they always assume I care, John? Why? SH_

**_You must have one of those faces,_** sent John, smirking. Or one of those souls, he didn’t say, that spends its whole life helping people and pretending it doesn’t matter.

**_What were they crying about?_ **

_I found out what triggered Larissa’s meltdown. She got pregnant as a teenager herself, apparently. Years ago. No friendly Dr Watson to help her; she took care of it on her own. Never managed to have children after, destroyed her marriage and her mental health trying. Last night she worked out Cynthia's situation from the floor show across the way, but what she saw was too much for her and she just snapped. SH_

_**What? And SHE killed the boyfriend?** _

_Of course not, don't be an idiot.  She saw him killed.  Then she stayed up all night scrubbing her grout. SH_

John let out a snort of laughter despite himself. That sounded more like it. An obsessive compulsive was about the least likely person there was to commit a crime, as caught up as they were in policing themselves for imagined guilt.

**_So who did kill him? You said it was solved._ **

_You should see her tiles, though, they’re really very clean. SH_

_I'd certainly accept it as proof of alibi. SH_

_How come ours never come up like that? SH_

**Because I don’t have a mental disorder that forces me to clean up after you!!!**

_Hmm. Debatable. SH_

**_Sherlock! The case?_ **

_Too complicated to explain by text. SH_

John scoffed a little at that.  The length of some of the texts Sherlock commonly sent him meant he was perfectly capable of laying out an entire case that way, no matter how complicated.  He just wanted to see John's face when he explained it—and so apparently that was all he going to get out of Sherlock for now, unless he was going to enter into the argument over the grout. Which he was _not_ , because somehow those sort of conversations always seemed to end up with him having been talked into cleaning something he’d had every intention of making Sherlock do if it killed him.

Dramatic git.

 ** _Fine_** , he sent. **_You can fill me in when I get home._**

_Still at NSY. Lestrade wants me to stay until I can finish the paperwork. I’ll be home as soon as I can create a distraction. SH_

**_Sherlock. Do the paperwork Greg needs. If you don’t play nicely he’ll stop bringing you the juicy ones._ **

_He wouldn’t. He needs me. SH_

**_Not more than he needs you to be a certified consultant so he can convert his arrests into convictions, he doesn't. You know why this matters._ **

Sherlock didn’t dignify that with a response, which was as close as he ever got to admitting John was right. John had packed up his things, wished the receptionist goodnight, and made it halfway to the tube station before the next text came.

_Anderson is being unspeakably dull. If makes one more boorish comment about unwise life choices, Donovan might punch him. SH_

**_Dont you provok him!_** John sent, stopping in the middle of the walkway so quickly that he nearly caused a three-pedestrian pileup, fingers fumbling over the keyboard in his haste.

_Too late. SH_

**_Sherlock…._ **

There was a pause, while John shuffled to the side of the footpath, mumbling an apology to the businessman who’s way he’d blocked. He got back a mildly repressive look that served as the British equivalent of mailed anthrax—and settled to wait for the interaction to play out at NSY.

 _Just a snippy comment_ , it finally came. _Her control’s better than I thought. SH_

John breathed a sigh of relief. Sherlock wasn’t as bad as he had been, back before… everything, but he did still bait Donovan something awful when he was bored.

**_Good! Now behave yourself!_ **

_No need. They’ve both gone back to their respective offices. Paperwork will go much faster without the fighting. SH_

**_All right,_** sent John, shaking his head.   ** _Pick up dinner from Chang’s on your way back, why don't you? I’m looking forward to hearing all about the murder._**

Then, in case Sherlock thought he was still going to be able to get away without explaining about their _other_ topic of conversation, he sent another.

**_And the confession. I’m intrigued._ **

_I’m sure you are. I’ll tell you everything when I get home. SH_

John’s heart clenched inside his chest.

As he sat on the tube, he scrolled back up through their message history together, unable to keep a straight face—or occasionally even from laughing out loud—at the antics of the extraordinary madman who shared his flat. And though he laughed, equally, each message wound the wire bands constricting his chest tighter and tighter, each comfortable exchange between them suddenly fraught with potential double meaning and hidden longing.

Sentiment.

It seemed so extraordinary, but if there was one thing he knew about Sherlock for certain, it was that there were layers hidden below his surface, layers of emotion and vulnerability and secret motivation, layers he kept so carefully hidden that their existence sometimes seemed to surprise even himself.

Why not this too?

But then if it _was_ this… what could John _possibly_ say to Sherlock to make it all right? To make sure their friendship didn’t suffer in the fallout?

He had a feeling “it’s all fine” wasn't going to cover it.


	6. Idle Hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which John is tired, bored, on edge, and possibly making less sense than usual. (Or just possibly a fraction more.)

John got back to an empty flat. The tiredness was starting to catch up with him at this point, a burning reminder in the backs of his eyes and the ache of his muscles that he’d had barely any sleep last night.

Probably, he should have sent Sherlock a message to forget about bringing something back for him for dinner and headed straight up to bed. It was one thing for Sherlock to stay awake for days straight living on cases and thin air—in his Uni days, John had pulled all-nighters with the best of them, and then pushed on to go out with the lads and celebrate—but he wasn’t as young as he used to be, and if he sat down to watch the telly he was going to be asleep before Sherlock got home.

Not willing to risk that, he sat down at his laptop to open up a blog entry he was still working on, the one about the case with the mongoose and the wounded veteran who’d walked all folded over on himself from a spinal injury acquired in the line of duty.

John squinted at the place he’d got up to, blinked drowsily a few times to focus his eyes, and managed to pick up the thread of writing again.

_… us to break in to look through the old records, to track down the CO’s copy of the briefing report of the mission where Henry Wood’s convoy ran into an ambush.  Not that Sherlock would tell me what we were looking for on it, not until much later when we finally found it!_

_Dramatic git._

_Anyway, we’d been crouched under the base commander’s desk for at least an hour at that point, combing through the files Sherlock had snatched out of the cabinet covering assorted milk runs, listening with half an ear for any change in the security patrols going past outside the door.  Then Sherlock put down his file and said, “John, I need to ask you…”_

_When I glanced up from the pile of folders, I was expecting some question about the case—the outfitting of this type of convoy, or the balance of personnel, or some comment about the traditional lack of military precision with which military paperwork was arranged—but he was watching me intently in the dim light spilled by the key-chain torch, his verdigris eyes shining like burnished opals._

_I stared back, compelled and abruptly terrified by weight of the question in his eyes, the play of shadow across those singular cheekbones._

_“I’ve got a confession…” he murmured. His words were so soft that it should have been barely audible, but our heads were close together and each one landed low and clear in my ear._

_He was much to close for the niceties of personal space, but when had he ever worried about that where I was concerned? I could feel the tingling awareness of him, the radiant warmth of his skin reaching across the narrow gap between us._

_I knew what he needed to say to me._

_Somehow, I’d_ always _known what he needed to say to me._

 _“John,” he said. “I know I told you that I was married to my work, but I find that with you… only_ you _, John, I…”_

 _As his face moved even closer to mine, the fierce, burning hope that had taken root in my heart was travelling lower. Slowly, inexorably, lower, until it…_  

With a cry, John jerked all the way awake, staring in horror at what he’d been writing. Face flaming with the fire of the Afghan sun at noon, he hastily deleted the half-written draft that genuinely crossed the line into the kind of bodice-ripping romantic fantasy of which Sherlock so often accused him.

That was _not_ how that break-in had gone!

He scowled accusingly at the blinking cursor, and then jumped in alarm as he noticed the title he’d given the entry a week ago, and hurriedly deleted that too.

Then he closed the browser. And shut down his laptop. Just to make sure.

 _The Not-Straight Man_ indeed. Just because Henry had walked all bent over, and Colonel Barclay hadn’t been as upright as he appeared, either….

Perhaps Sherlock was right about John’s blog titles being just a little bit lame.

A memory-flash of what John had been writing lit involuntarily in his mind, making him shudder.

As though anything like that had ever come _close_ to happening.

As though Sherlock would have given even a moment’s thought to something like that while on a _case_.

Or at all, obviously.

And neither would John. _Obviously_.

The last thing he wanted was for anything like that to happen; it would be a _disaster_  if Sherlock had developed feelings for him!

John still hadn’t the first idea how to say ‘no’ to him without making things awkward. It was different now, to what it had been, back in Angelo’s all those years ago. They had history. They knew each other, inside and out; there would be no hiding behind misunderstandings or ignorance. And there was too much at stake.

They’d _both_ imploded without the other in their lives, back when everything had gone wrong. Things had really only just got past all that. John was past all the hurt he’d never thought would heal, Sherlock was past all the hurt he’d never admitted existed, and everything was fine again.

It was _all fine_.

Finally.

And now this confession thing had come along out of nowhere to upset the applecart again. The idea of Sherlock wrestling with some kind of _sentiment_ he needed to tell John about, it was driving John _crazy—_ because that’s not how this worked. Not for John, and _certainly_ not for Sherlock.

Was it possible that John had the wrong end of the stick again? Surely it was. Even if he simply _couldn’t_ think of any other option at this point, anything that fit with the things Sherlock had said about it.

He just hoped like hell the other man didn’t have some way of deducing the idle flight of fancy John had half-written, half-dreamed.

It would make it ever so much more more awkward for Sherlock to accept John’s refusal—and it would give him more ammunition for when he got sulky about it—because no matter how kindly John worded it, he knew Sherlock too well to think the following self-destructive tantrum would be anything but spectacular. Sherlock was always eager to spread around misery he wasn't going to admit to feeling.

“Ah,” he would say at the worst possible moment, perhaps when they were at a crime scene, “of course John’s recently moved on from writing tawdry romantic fantasies about my methods to writing tawdry romantic fantasies about _me_. It’s all terribly overblown, of course—far too many superlatives.”

And then John would have to change his name and move to Argentina and spend the rest of his life raising llamas rather than risk the embarrassment of seeing the faces of anyone he’d ever met ever again.

No!

No.

John was getting too tired at this point, he’d stopped making sense, started babbling semi-conscious rubbish. That was what was going on here. It was definitely for the best to stay away from the blog for the moment.

And perhaps from any kind of kind of note-taking materials.

John didn’t want to take the risk of finding out what an unattended pen might write.

Robbed of anything useful to do, he took himself off to the shower to wash off the stress and the tiredness and the lingering smell of the surgery—disinfectant and the vomit of small children—and maybe have a bit of a wank to settle his nerves, that was always safe enough.

Under the spray of hot water, John let images of long hair and softly curving breasts and round buttocks blossom in his head, closing his eyes and letting the amorphous collection of disconnected fantasy take him away without trying to guide it.

_Wet pebbled skin, eagerly shifting under his hands, gasps of encouragement. She wanted him, more than anything, she was writhing against him, spreading her legs for him, crying out his name…_

_“John,” plush lips moaned in his ear, beneath the kiss of water cascading down his neck, and the long, strong, familiar fingers that wrapped around his cock weren’t his own, but they pulled him firmly, expertly. “I need you to… I need_ you, _John.  I confess I’ve always”_ _—fuck, so good **—** “always wanted you._”

 _He wanted him, wanted_ John _, who was arching helplessly into Sherlock’s answering—_

John ripped his hands free and planted his palms flat against the tiles, staring at his unbowed erection in consternation.

 _That_ had never happened before.

Sherlock had given him the brush-off a long, _long_  time ago, when John hadn’t even been asking, not that he _would_ have ever asked, because John had never, _ever_ wanted to cross that line.

Not _ever_.

But…

Well, the reaction here was undeniable, and John had never been one for lying to himself.  Not, at least, on purpose.  Perhaps... perhaps that brush-off had had a greater impact on John than he'd ever realised.

He hadn’t been hurt by it—he _hadn’t_ even been _asking_ for God's sake! Even if he had been—asking, or gay, which he hadn't and wasn’t—then Sherlock was obviously way out of his league. No one could be offended by having a shot in the dark like that turned down.

John really _hadn’t_ been asking.

But having that unasked question answered had certainly neatened the edges on their boxes, hadn’t it?

Some ideas were, obviously, ridiculous. Everyone had fleeting thoughts like that, passing things. And when they were _that_ completely disengaged from reality, those passing thoughts just passed straight on, unworthy even of an acknowledgement.

John had never felt that way about Sherlock. The idea was absurd. It wasn’t an option. For either of them. They’d both made that clear at the outset.

Which was fine.

But…

But that had been a long time ago. They’d been through a lot together, and apart, and together again, since then. And it seemed, if Sherlock was going to retract his part of that initial accord….

If Sherlock was going to come over all, all… _sentimental_. Over _John_. Over John, who he lived with and worked with and ate with and spent all his spare time with, and who he put up with correcting his manners and making him label his experiments and loving people who would shoot him in the chest….

Well, it seemed that some parts of John’s body were not entirely on board with the whole not-gay thing, if an option like Sherlock was available.

Because, well. _Sherlock_. Obviously.

Of course, technically, apart from the fact that it was a bit not good to fantasise about your probably-asexual best friend who’d turned you down anyway, not that you'd been asking because you weren't gay… apart from _that_ … technically, John didn’t have a problem with it. Because it was, the not gay thing was, it was…

It was just a _fact_ , wasn’t it, not actually an, ah, an actual _moral_ issue. As such. If John was to turn out to be, well, just a _little_ bit gay. Well. That wasn't what you might call a _problem_ , was it? It was all fine, after all.

And Christ, it wasn’t like anyone could blame _anyone_ for noticing _Sherlock_ , could they? Bloody _gorgeous_ , he was. Enough to turn _anyone_ ’s head. Blind, dead, asexual eunuchs who’d taken a vow of chastity probably couldn’t have kept Sherlock from turning up in their heads looking like, well, _Sherlock_ , whenever he damn well wanted to.

Dramatic git.

Tentatively, John pulled his hands off the tiles. He gave them a thorough wash under the running water—because who knew the last experiment that had found temporary refuge in the bathtub, or how high it had splashed, and it was better to be safe than sorry with some things—and resumed his previous exertions.

When thoughts of Sherlock joined the other images in his head once more, John frowned a little to himself, but this time didn’t make himself stop.


	7. Sherlock, completed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's home! And John's ready to hear the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, you guys, I try my best to make my chapters roughly even in length, but this one’s just a monster, and the only remotely possible places to break it are pure evil. Enjoy—I hope all your theories come true. :)

When John made it out of the bathroom ten minutes later—clean and fully dressed and flushed pink with embarrassment and determination and a strange kind of exhilarated anticipation that seemed to have completely washed away the tiredness—he felt entirely ready for what Sherlock might say… _whatever_ Sherlock might say.

And Sherlock was already home.

His flatmate had ignored the plates that John had set out on the coffee table and seated himself cross-legged on the floor in the midst of a sea of open takeaway containers, wielding a pair of chopsticks at random like a large wading bird with particularly exceptional cheekbones.

“I was right,” said Sherlock without looking at him. He stabbed his chopsticks into a container seemingly at random, snagged a Kung Pao prawn and popped it into his mouth, looking thoroughly self-satisfied as he chewed. “I went to The Golden Duck—the bottom third of their door handle’s had noticeably more tarnish than Chang’s lately. They’ve got a new chef.”

John found his own pair of chopsticks and settled cross-legged opposite his flatmate without delay. At the end of a case, when breaking his self-imposed fast to avoid digesting on a case, Sherlock could pack away food alarmingly quickly, and he had no concept of holding back from picking out the good bits. John had found out early on in the piece that he had to be quick if he was going to get his fair share of the Peking steak.

“So, the case is solved then,” he said, going for casual. He took the last spring roll before Sherlock could eat it out from under him; there was barely anything left, Sherlock must have arrived home not long after he’d gone under the water. “Paperwork done, too?”

“Obviously,” said Sherlock, rolling his eyes. “Turned out to be a seven after all, rather satisfying.”

“Sorry I missed it, then.”

Normally, John would have asked more about it—who’d killed the young man, and why. How Sherlock’s stakeout had convinced Larissa Margate to tell the truth, and what she’d finally said. Normally, he would have been burning up with curiosity for the solution after having seen nothing the impossibilities of the beginning, and the merest glimpses along the way of the path Sherlock’s extraordinary mind took to see to the centre of a puzzle other people sometimes weren’t even aware existed. And burning with worry about poor Cynthia, who was trying to deal with a dead boyfriend and a bun in the oven, as well as someone committing murder in an effort to—according to Sherlock—protect her.

But Sherlock didn’t seem worried about it. He seemed downright _chipper_ , for him, and not in the way of a freshly mummified corpse found in the British Museum with all its organs correctly sorted when the exhibit had been filled with tourists all day. And right now, John had to admit that the case wasn’t the highest priority on his mind. It was apparently resolved, and he’d barely managed to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time since Sherlock had mentioned _sentiment_.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He _had_ to know.

“So, this morning,” John said. He grabbed a container of fried rice and shovelled some into his mouth. Nothing said ‘it’s all fine here’ like mumbling around half a mouthful of food. “You said you had a confession?”

“Yes,” said Sherlock and this time he smiled, the uncertainty gone. Apparently he’d resolved matters in his mind to his own satisfaction. “ _Obviously_ she didn’t do it, though,” he said. “Larissa Margate is only five foot five, entirely the wrong height to fit the angle of the impact wound on the Jason Blythe’s skull—the level she’d stacked the dishes, you see? And she hadn’t left the house in _months_ before she ended up at the police station. Cynthia Patterson was a much better suspect—a tall volleyball champion like her could bring that globe down with more than enough force—and no one can be kept busy by vomiting _all_ the time. Obviously she wasn’t going to be able to hide that she was pregnant forever, or that Blythe was the father. She had motive.”

John had taken a moment to start following. He hadn’t asked about the case, but…

“God, Sherlock, no! Did _Cynthia_ kill him? Surely not!” he said, thinking about the miserable hunched figure of the girl he’d had in his office that morning. And she’d talked about wasting her life! “But, she was so sick! Could she really have managed it, in her condition?”

Sherlock tipped his head consideringly. “Probably. She had periods of relative normality, and it doesn’t take long to get a lucky shot on someone’s head.” He mimed holding a ball up with both hands and bringing it down. “But that was the problem—I could only be _fairly_ certain that she _hadn’t_ done it. She’d showered, which took care of most of the evidence, but there were little signs missing, things that should have stayed—nothing much, bruises on her palms from the blow, perhaps, torn nails maybe from having scrabbled to control the heavy object, deeper stance marks that wouldn’t have quite scuffed out of the carpet. Those little pieces weren’t lining up. Besides, it seemed unlikely that she wouldn’t have vomited immediately after—the exertion required, from an un-hardened killer barely holding a lid on her stomach to begin with—but there were no traces of it, no signs of unusual cleaning."

Sherlock paused to stuff a quantity of rice into his mouth that, on any other person, would have looked ungainly, but on him merely looked like the people with table manners weren't doing it right.

“Then again," he said after swallowing, "the absence of a couple of indicators wouldn’t mean anything in the face of the overwhelming evidence against her once her connection to the boy came out, as it must—and once NSY discovered what I had, hidden underneath her bed: the missing globe, covered in her fingerprints, along with a bundle of her clothes soaked with his blood. It wouldn’t take Anderson to connect the dots.”

“But she _didn’t_ do it, did she?” said John, shifting forward on his seat. He loved it when Sherlock let him in on all the details of his process. “ _You_ didn’t think so!”

“And I was right,” grinned Sherlock. “Now that Larissa’s finally telling the truth, Cynthia’s confessed to everything. She convinced her parents to go on to the play without her so she could ask Jason over, told him she was pregnant. It went badly. They argued about what to do, couldn’t make progress in between her frequent trips to the loo. He wouldn’t listen to her, at one point got up in her face—she pushed him away—she’s a strong girl, and she was scared. He fell back against the bookshelf, knocked the bookend off its shelf onto his head, and didn’t get up again. So far so easy—a straightforward self-defence accident—but then she panicked. Not the best decision-maker in a crisis, is Cynthia. She couldn’t think of anything past the fact that she didn’t want to explain to her parents about who Jason was, and what he’d been doing there. He was too heavy for her to move out of the house, but after she’d got his blood all over her trying, she tried to make it look like a break-in gone wrong and in the process managed to destroy most of the evidence that there never had _been_ a murder in the first place. Hid the globe and her clothes under her bed, hoping to dispose of them properly later when she was feeling better, and ended up just about framing herself. Silly girl.”

“Poor thing, she must have been terrified!” said John, eyes wide. “And she had that high fever, too, she probably wasn’t entirely capable of thinking straight. Have you got enough evidence to prove what really happened? Will she be okay?”

“I expect so.” Sherlock made a dismissive gesture. “Having an unrelated eyewitness makes it open and shut, even if they should both technically be charged with obstruction. They’ll probably both get off with a warning for wasting a lot of police time.”

John chewed his way through a ball of honey chicken, thinking about it. “No, hang on—” he said, swallowing quickly. “The bookend wasn’t there! Didn’t you say that shelf was full of a whole lot of new books?”

“It _was_ there, John,” said Sherlock. “That was the whole point. Unfortunately, the shelf being full didn’t stop a family of booklovers trying to cram everything back on in double-stacks anyway. Things don’t just fall off shelves where they’ve been placed securely—but from the area available, it looked like the thing would fallen off in a moderately stiff breeze.”

“Brilliant!”

“Basic physics, John,” scoffed Sherlock. “NSY should try it. So should the Pattersons, or invest in some lighter bookends before they lose any more house-guests.”

John grinned at him fondly. “And so you sent Lestrade over to Larissa to get the real story, but she was too upset to talk and said she hadn’t seen anything, and you had to spend the day working out how to prove Cynthia was innocent!”

“Larissa didn’t say she hadn’t seen anything,” said Sherlock, frowning back. “She said she’d _done_ it, done it herself. Said she’d sneaked into the Pattersons late last night, lured the boy with her on the promise of sweeties or a Playstation or something, like some wicked old witch, murdered him in cold blood, and that she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Cynthia outside the bathroom the whole time. Played on her mental illness when asked for a motive, insisted it was true.”

“But why ever would she make a confession if she knew it was an acci—”

And then John stopped.

A horrible, horrible thought had occurred to him, a frisson of apprehensive certainty travelling down the back of his neck. His chopsticks hovered, forgotten, on the edge of the box of shredded steak.

“Wait,” said John. “Sherlock. Was _that_ … was that your confession you’ve been talking about? All day? You… were talking about… about _Larissa_ , about _her_ confessing to killing the boy when she hadn’t, and you wanted to ask me, ask me… if I could work out why she might say…. This is about the _case?_ ”

“Well, yes.” Sherlock gave him an odd look. “I told you. I sent Lestrade to question her; I thought she’d clear everything up, and they’d work out it had been an accident quickly enough—but instead of telling them the truth, she _confessed_ to killing him, and knew enough of the details that they believed her. Lestrade texted to thank me for it, let me know they were wrapping it up, even though she still wouldn’t properly explain her motive—and wouldn’t tell them where the murder weapon was. She could see into that whole side of the house, she had a perfect view of Cynthia’s bedroom—she knew as well as I did where it was—but she knew the fingerprints wouldn’t match her story, they would have put _Cynthia_ back in the crosshairs. So I convinced Lestrade to let her out on bail—let her overhear a conversation about searching Cynthia’s room later on—and we were there waiting for her when she sneaked in to replace the fingerprints with her own. She was pretty rattled already by being out of her home environment, and I managed to get the whole story out of her.”

“But,” John wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He knew he should let this go, but he’d spent _all day_ wound up about this. The theories he’d come up with! And… oh god, the _shower_!

All of a sudden that felt like it had been a terrible violation of Sherlock’s clearly uninterrupted disinterest in the entire subject.

“You looked…” he said, “you looked _unsure_ , Sherlock. You’re _never_ unsure!”

“You flatter me,” smirked Sherlock, stealing the last bit of steak out from under John’s limp chopsticks. “I couldn’t work it out _why_ she would say she’d done it, when she so obviously hadn’t. I thought you’d understand better, and you did, part of it. Why would a woman who couldn’t even leave her own home go to such lengths to go to prison protecting someone to whom she had no romantic or familial connection, no caretaking responsibility or obvious bond—rather than just telling the truth about it being an accident in the first place! There had to be some kind of sentiment involved that I wasn’t seeing.”

“Sentiment?” croaked John.

“Precisely!” said Sherlock, with a toss of his hair. “You were right: all those years, all that time she spent alone in her house with her compulsions, standing at that sink endlessly washing and watching the little girl next door grow up. Cynthia was the closest she ever had to her own, even though she’d never spoken to her. By the time Lestrade arrived to question her, she’d quite convinced herself that the whole thing was her own fault, some echo of her past that she’d brought on Cynthia by, I don’t know, missing some part of a ritual she should have done, or just her innate _badness_ —but that the only way to be sure that Cynthia didn’t end up in prison or worse was for her to claim responsibility.”

“Oh,” said John, still fighting against the wrong-footedness that came of having spent the last day worrying, soul-searching, and deciding—apparently in vain. “That, that poor woman.”

“She’ll get help now,” Sherlock waved his hand, as though that was easy. “She’ll have to, to avoid the obstruction charge if nothing else.”

“Oh. Good,” said John.

And then he had to occupy himself with finding something to eat among the leftover wreckage of the takeaway, to avoid Sherlock’s eyes. His sympathy for Cynthia and her foolish, panicked-stricken attempts to cover up one mistake after another… for Larissa and her lifelong obsession with what she’d lost… and for the boy who should have been more sensitive toward a girl he’d had a responsibility to support but whose death had been tragedy nonetheless…

All of that was overwhelmed by a sudden, terrible grief for himself; a grief for something that he’d never even imagined he wanted, something that he’d denied and ignored without ever having consciously noticed; something he’d believed in for such a tragically short period before it was snatched away without having ever really been offered.

“Whatever is the _matter_ with you, John?” demanded Sherlock, narrowing his eyes, laser sharp gaze suddenly flicking around over John’s face. “You’re all… red. And your forehead’s tense… You’re clenching your jaw, too, and blinking a lot. You’re… upset. Surprised, embarrassed. Trying to hide it. Not the least bit impressed about the case—it’s even one that worked out with everyone happy, well, except the dead boy, I suppose, but there’s no helping that. You love those!”

Then Sherlock’s eyes went distant, looking at John without really looking at him; looking _through_ John to see him at a level beyond looking.

Bollocks.

“No, Sherlock,” John tried desperately.

Sherlock was flicking a fingertip beside his face in quick downward motions, as though scrolling back through a transcript of their conversation far too quickly to truly be reading.

“I’m fine, absolutely fine,” said John. “You’re, that’s, um. Brilliant. Amazing, as always! I’m just. Annoyed. That I had to work, so I couldn’t ride along. And upset, that I didn’t notice more wrong with Cynthia. I should have seen she was still hiding something. You’re right, it was a good case. Why don’t you tell me more. About it. Amaze me, go on.”

“Oh, I see,” said Sherlock distantly. “ _Confession_. Overloaded word, unclear phrasing. Personal pronoun. My case, my witness, my confession… You thought—”

His eyes abruptly focused again, piercingly clear on John’s face.

“You weren’t thinking about the case at all. You thought I meant _I_ had something to confess. To you.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” said John, cheeks aflame with humiliation. He tried to chew his way faster through a bite of Mongolian lamb he’d found that had escaped Sherlock’s all-seeing eyes underneath a drift of capsicum. He peered intensely into the box, wishing he could hide so easily, digging deep until he emerged with the lesser prize of a sauce-soaked broccoli floret between his chopsticks. “Makes complete sense what you meant now,” he said, chewing miserably.

Of course it did. Sherlock hadn’t been avoiding it, he’d been talking to John about the big confession all day, it was just that John hadn’t realised, his mind off on a different fantastical track.

“So,” he said, “tell me how you convinced Larissa to recant her, um, what she said? Breaking through an obsessional mindset like that can be difficult, if she really thought she’d caused it.”

Sherlock was watching John closely, undeterred, and added, “Something _sentimental_.”

Helpless to prevent it, John’s eyes flickered to his desk, and Sherlock followed his gaze. Whatever he saw there made his eyebrows go up, pulling his eyes into the ghost of a smirk, even though the rest of his face stayed blank. God, Sherlock could probably read every word John had written in the angle of his laptop or the distance he’d pushed in his chair.

He turned back to look at John in tolerant amusement, as though only realising right at this moment how very small and idiotic he was.

“Oh, John,” he said, not unkindly.

“That certainly wasn’t my first thought!” protested John, going on the offensive. “I imagined you’d probably poisoned me or something!”

“Mmm, did you now?” One corner of Sherlock’s mouth tucked into a smirk to match his eyes. “That thought didn’t put you off your stroke though, did it?”

He tipped his head towards the bathroom door without breaking eye contact, making John’s flush deepen.

Sherlock’s smirk deepened too, and John began to wonder if there was any truth to the tales of spontaneous human combustion from the sheer heat of embarrassment.

Of _course_ Sherlock knew about the shower; he knew everything. And John had thought this couldn’t get worse. It looked like he was going to have to start looking into flights to Argentina. Tonight.

Vainly, John tried to remember the shots he’d need to arrange before he went. Not hepatitis, he’d been fully vaccinated for that before deployment to Afghanistan, and typhoid too. Yellow fever would be the main one. Maybe rabies; if he was going to look into the llama thing, he should check if they were carriers. The surgery should have all of that to hand. He could use his key, dose himself and be on a plane before morning if it came to it.

“Leave it, Sherlock,” he begged without much hope. “Just… tell me something else about the case. _Please_.”

“Then again,” Sherlock went on, ignoring him, “that _wouldn’t_ put you off, would it? Perhaps I should have thought of that before….”

“Thought of what?” demanded John, lost. “The case? Apparently you haven’t stopped thinking about the case _all day_!”

Why had John ever imagined anything else? How could he have he forgotten? Sherlock _never_ let his focus shift from an active case! Not even to eat, or to sleep, and John— _Joh_ n, on the flimsiest of excuses, had built up an entire romantic fantasy in his mind that Sherlock might have dropped his legendary iron discipline and started multitasking, solely to indulge in some kind of ridiculous affection towards _John_?

“No,” said Sherlock, giving him another tolerant look as he shifted takeaway containers one by one from the floor up onto the coffee table beside the unused plates John had set out. “I should have remembered that _you_ would like that. That it would be risky. That this could be _dangerous_ , for us.”

“This? What?” asked John, still struggling to find his footing in a conversation where apparently, he hadn’t had the right thread from the very beginning, from the very start of the day when Sherlock had come to ask him for clarification on how and why someone apparently indifferent could _possibly_ have been hiding a love for another person behind a facade they’d never broken through for years and years on end.

Because apparently _John_ was the one who was the expert on that subject.

Stupid, stupid, _stupid_.

“Well,” said Sherlock, giving up on transferring the dishes one by one and carelessly shoving all the remaining containers against the base of John’s chair with an arm. “I’m certainly not letting you backtrack now that you’ve got this far all on your own.”

One of the boxes tipped over, spilling soggy-sticky deep fried balls of chicken across the rug, but Sherlock didn’t seem to notice. He leaned forward onto his hands and crawled through the gap he’d cleared until he was nose to nose with John, who was frozen in panic.

“John,” said Sherlock seriously, those impossible pale eyes wide and close and open. “I’ve got a confession.”

Then he grinned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who’ve been keeping count, those five ways that one might, hypothetically, confess to one’s flatmate would be
> 
>   1. Freak out after writing something you feel guilty about, leaving your chair at an unusual 63.7 degree angle to the closed lid of your laptop.
>   2. Follow this by touching yourself up in the shower, taking a transparent four minutes longer than your median standard shower time and emerging with an obvious flush.
>   3. Make foolish assumptions and respond in all the wrong ways when he tries to tell you about an interesting case.
>   4. Accuse him of poisoning you, when he knows perfectly well that you’re attracted to danger, and…
>   5. Don’t pull away after the closing curtain.
> 

> 
> And nope, I’m still not going to tell you what Sherlock’s confession is. The warning was right there in the tags, folks! But I'm sure you can guess. ;)
> 
> My home may or may not have a pair of very heavy brass bookends, which have for some time been balanced on the edge of their shelves to make room for a rank of books behind them. How about I just go and shift those right now? Yeah, I thought that sounded like a good idea.
> 
> If you've enjoyed, I'd love to hear from you. :)


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